What I Do At Work

This is an archived post
This is an archived post

Setting Asterisk 1.8 Caller ID from Legacy PBX Systems

September 19 2011, 9:30 AM by Mike Boylan

Unfortunately we still have numbers registered to our old Nortel PBX. After many trials, we have been unsuccesful at passing the caller ID name from the Nortel PBX to our Asterisk systems. We implemented the following solution/workaround into the [stdexten] subroutine.

That line checks to see if there is an Asterisk database entry for the caller ID number in the database family "cidname". We've loaded all of our Nortel users' names and extensions into astdb. If there is an entry in the databse, that line overrides whatever is in sip.conf or whatever, if anything, is coming over the wire.

Here's an example. Let's say I have a phone registered at extension 1000 with the caller ID line set to "Mike Boylan" <1000> in sip.conf. If I do the following, the caller ID will be changed when I dial (to any number that uses stdexten) to "Legacy PBX CID".

If you can get your legacy PBX systems to send Caller ID information, including the name, to Asterisk, great. But if you're like us and struggle to do so, this is a very reasonable workaround. Your users will never know, nor do they care, how the CID information is being set.